


Tuesday In The Woods

by apiphile, jar



Series: thursdayverse [5]
Category: Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Blood, Drugs, F/M, Fairy Tales, Fights, Gen, M/M, Mob AU, Torture, Violence, actually written by jess, allegorical drugs trip, baseball bat, character torture, co-writing, girl taller than boy, protagonist is a psychopath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-11
Updated: 2010-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile, https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/pseuds/jar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thursdayverse Part 5: the series was co-authored, this chapter was actually written by JAR. Backstory: how Vicky-T came to be a Cobra, and Andy Hurley stopped being one.</p><p>This fic will not make sense unless you have read Thursday Kids Like To Cause, Died On A Wednesday, Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting (So Is Friday), and Black Monday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tuesday In The Woods

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to channonyarrow for beta. This part was written by JAR.

"Hello. My name is Victoria. I am an addict. I am powerless."

What she wants to say: Hello. My name is Vicky-T. I'm alone. I'm terminally bored. I'm going to score tonight despite all of you. To spite all of you.

She sits down and tugs her kneesocks up, snaps the elastic down against her skin. There are familiar red marks embossed around the tops of her calves. They look scarred, or burned. She hates how quickly the marks fade away when she takes her socks off, but it's a metaphor for her life—she knows she is an acceptably pretty monster, her skin has never matched her guts.

What they say: "Hello, Victoria."

She resists the urge to yawn, laugh and throw the hot coffee she's nursing in the faces of the other group members. They _bore_ her, their stories are boring. Fuck it sideways, _her_ story is boring.

She keeps her head down and gnaws at the edge of an Oreo. She scrunches her nose up. The biscuits here are staler than her underused cunt. She tries to think of a fucked up metaphor for the lawsuit-hot coffee while Diane, 30-year-old-addict-mother-of-three finishes her typically tragic, averagely awful story of woe. Stale-cunt biscuits and coffee weak and bitter as an addict. She coughs her laughter out, almost polite. There's a tall guy she hasn't seen before who catches her eye as she glances sideways, looks like he's smiling at her. As if she's stupid enough to pick up at a meeting—well, there was the one time—she knows these people, these are people like her. Not worth it.

NA is an organization that keeps growing. This is boastfully pasted in all their flyers. This thing grows and grows and grows and Vicky can't help but wonder if that isn't because _it doesn't fucking work_. More drugs more drugs more drugs, that's what we want. To escape. To not be here-- to, fuck. She'd love to not be here.

What_ever_. Two long years of whatever.

\---

NA had helped. It did. Past tense. Vicky-T is bored, now. Terminally bored—terminal. It's not just a turn of phrase when you're an addict. In this cardboard-cut-out, apron-wearing, cake-baking, nine-to-five, bloodless limp dick world, boredom means backsliding.

Can't afford a backslide, oh no.

Vicky-T is wondering _why,_ exactly, that is, again.

Her shitty job at the cosmetics store, working for Mike who thinks because she let him fuck her once he owned her? Her friends? What fucking friends. NA? Her shithole apartment wedged damp and stuffy between two larger old brick houses, like some crumbling growth of fungus between sweaty rolls of fat? Family? She thinks of it last because it's the lowest on a list of bullshit people keep telling her is important, important to have and to hold and to love. She doesn't, she never has, and they never did. Wondering why exactly it doesn't scare her, not enough. She never loved dope, she never did—she loved that dope excused everything, that pills let her stop thinking, stop listening and just _be_. Powerful, above it all. Vicky-T's never had anything like a true, amazing NA spiritual awakening (as carefully PC'd up as that has been, the group leader with her silver cross and her shifty-eyed handout of contraband bibles after meetings, what _she_ makes sure they all understand, is that they've all been missing that deep thrust of Jesus right into their warm, waiting hearts), she's sick of fucking waiting, and maybe, just maybe, that is _it_.

She stops in the parking lot, wiggles her toes around in her heels, trying to get them more comfortable. She wishes she had a fucking cigarette, but there's no smoke breaks and she always overestimates her desire for that nicotine hit after being stuck in a room with people she hates for as long as it takes them to tell her stories she's already heard.

"You're not, you know."

She nearly jumps out of her fucking skin, eight gallons of overly strong free coffee coursing through her veins and adrenaline slamming through her, until she turns around and—it's the tall guy with the eyes from the meeting. He's attractive, attractive enough she doesn't knee him in the balls first off. Instead she takes a breath and keeps walking.

"Fuck you," she says. What guy thinks he's going to get in with a girl accosting her in a parking lot, at night, while she's all a-fucking-lone? A more careful girl might have kicked him in the nuts and called the cops by now. She scrunches up her nose even thinking the word "cops". She's not a careful girl. Lucky him.

He follows her, a very careful arm's length away from her side. Trying not to spook her. As if she couldn't take his eyes out before he had a chance to stick it in—she would. She'd bounce his head off the pavement, she can almost hear the flesh dull thud, the bone crunching smack. She crosses her wrists behind her back and bounce-skips for half a step, smiles selfish and small.

"You're _meant_ to say "not what?" so I can say "not powerless". You're cold blocking my white hot moves, here."

She what whating his _what?_ She wants to laugh, but she doesn't. Doesn't want to encourage the asshole. "And you were meant to fuck off when I said "fuck off", but we can't always get what we want, can we?"

"Can we start again? I'm Gabe. Hi. Hello. _Hola_."

She stops and faces him. He smiles at her like he's just out-fiddled the devil, and fuck his soul, she's the prize he's asked for. Vicky-T can either take this chance on tall dark and crazy eyed or she can walk three blocks to the payphone, put her cash in, call James, and score. No one'd miss her if she OD'd, no one'd miss her if this guy turned out to be the kind of sick prick who fucks the corpses of the sad, lonely girls he picks up at NA meetings. She wouldn't even miss herself. She turns around.

"Got a smoke?" she asks. Second impression: tall. Very, very tall. He's smiling still. Maybe relapsed on something really, really good. Maybe he'll share.

"I'll go you one better, I'll buy you pie," he says. He makes pie sounds like a really good deal.

"Fuck your pie, buy me a packet of smokes and a drink." She doesn't like pie as much as she likes lung cancer.

"I'll buy you the smokes if you come get pie with me."

—-

She gets some pie and wonders how someone she just met could charm her into getting pie in the middle of the night when what she really wants is some pills and some smokes and some fucking ketamine and to never ever think again.

Vicky-T spins the spoon over in her mouth and sucks the ice cream off, pulls it out of her mouth with a pop.

"Sometimes I wonder if, just maybe, I needed to get sober and learn to be good just to realise that I'm _not_. You ever wonder if maybe you're just inherently _bad_?" She scrapes at the ice cream melting over the sides of his slice of pie. It's late enough she's feeling stoned-tired, and that's her excuse for all the bullshit that's falling out of her mouth. As if he cares.

"Never," he says.

"Never," she repeats flatly and waits for a line about god.

"I _know_ I'm bad." He smirks at her, dorky-smooth.

"Sure you are." She breathes out an amused huff, sinking into the ripples of her deliciously crappy coffee. Hot coffee on her stolen-ice cream cold tongue feels ridiculous and awesome.

"You ever hear this saying? It's one of my favourites: when someone tells you who they are, listen." She can't tell if he's being serious. He says it with a conviction that nearly hypnotizes her, eyes right on hers, unflinching, confident. On the other hand, his purple and green baseball cap is twisted half around to the side like a hip-hop kid from the 80s.

"You're telling me you're really really _bad_?" She looks at him from under her eyelashes and sighs like a starstruck teen. She doesn't bother to hide her sarcasm.

"See? You're listening now."

So maybe she wasn't being as convincingly sarcastic as she'd have liked. The thing is, she is listening.

"You're not a _good_ girl are you?" It's the kind of thing that should sound _awful_, cheesy, creepy. It's not that it doesn't, it's just that he also makes it sound like he's not asking a question, it's more like he _knows_.

She hadn't been. Assault charges on top of drug charges on top of theft both petty and grand on top of one or two breaks with reality strong enough to bring everything and everyone down on top of her—everything, everything, all her life—on top of her like a mountain, weighing her down. Baseball bats and speedballs and psych wards and bad boyfriends with broken legs and _bullshit_. A whole other life.

"You do what you have to, when you're an addict." The spoon clanks loudly on the tabletop. It's funny how sometimes, the best lie is the truth.

"I'm not judging you, Victoria."

"My name is Vicky-T." She wonders why she's telling him. No one's ever listened before. About her name.

"Vicky-T. Sounds badass." He smiles, and she looks so closely for any hint of laughter she's sure her eyes are crossing.

It's worth the half humiliating feeling of exposing herself.

—-

Morning is mouldy wallpaper and picking a dress out of the pile in the corner. Crinkled black babydoll, crushed green stripes? She holds them up against her chest and smoothes them down. Ish. She pictures what her mother would have said about the creases and wrinkles of her dress. Has the sudden urge to put her foot through the mirror. A couple of years ago she would have, sniffing and laughing and cracking the shards under her heels, picking up the pieces to draw blood. Last night she would have, maybe, if—Gabe. He seemed like the kind of guy that could appreciate a little random destruction. As it is, she can't afford a new full-length mirror, she's tired and sober and needs to get to work in the next half hour and Gabe, like every fucker ever, isn't here. Her good mood from last night is slipping away.

Black babydoll. Wednesday Addams' plaits. She's feeling funereal.

Mike's shop is small, nearly a corridor, like a particularly well lit and nice smelling alleyway. It's shiny and modern and _chic_, its shelves stacked with organic cosmetics, a pyramid display of organic mumbojumbo lavender jojoba rich whatever-the-pink-ones-smell-awesome bath bombs on a plinth that Vicky-T had stacked herself. Again and again. She slides the door open, trails her fingers over the shelf down one side. No dust. If she were really really, really tall, she could maybe touch the other shelf with her fingertips. She's not as big as sometimes feels, though.

Mike's not in yet. Of course Mike's not in yet. Because it's Tuesday, and Tuesday is Mike's day for flirting with airhead regulars. She flicks the lights on and slumps down on her elbows, leaning against the Windex streaked counter. She'll move when Mike gets in—the door tinkles irritatingly as he shoves it open. (She found the bell charming at first. At this point she wants to shove it up Mike's ass so far he chokes on it) She smiles happily toward Mike, but not at him.

"Good morning, Victoria."

"Morning," she says. He would cry like a little bitch and shit jinglebells all the way home to Mommy.

"You look awfully cheerful this morning. Took it easy last night?"

Oh of course. She freezes her smile on her face, clenching her teeth to restrain herself from spitting at him. It's fucking Tuesday morning. If there's ever a day he doesn't imply she's a junkie whore with no self-restraint, she'll eat a bar of his shitty organic soap. Condescending asshole. At least this time he's not whispering in people's ears that she's in recovery, working the charity case angle.

When she first met Mike, she thought he reminded her of someone. His pretty blank blue eyes and his constant unshakeable little smirk, turning up the right side of his thin lips. She'd first moved here with no job and nothing but her parents' promise that they'd pay her rent for the first few months so long as she stayed clean (so long as she _stayed away_, god forbid they ever _ever_ look after her, wouldn't want to break a perfect record of shunting her off to be someone else's problem). She'd met Mike—homesickness, or maybe just the desire to test her resolve not to go back to everything and everyone she'd left behind— and she'd gone home with him, with his obvious hands and his shitty pick-up line of offering her the lipgloss he sold. That one's a freebie, wink wink. It was pretty good lipgloss. What_ever_.

Her only joy with Mike is in knowing that as much as he wants to, he will never fuck her again and she will still keep this job and take his fucking money.

"Where's Sophie?" she asks, and doesn't add "did she get wet and melt?"

"Should be—here she is," Mike's smile is lecherous.

Vicky-T is nauseous.

Sophie is a pearly-toothed snob. Vicky-T's not sure how someone who must weigh under 100 pounds manages to contain just that much _cunt_. She's practically a walking vagina.

"Hi, Sophie," she says, sing-song.

"Mmm." She flicks a smile at her like she's throwing a hungry dog a bone, and rakes her eyes up-down over Vicky-T.

Sophie and Mike proceed to put their massive heads together and leave Vicky-T to put their open sign out and clean the sticky fingerprints off the mirrors. She's working on a particularly stubborn stain at irritating-child level—spit, maybe. Sticky.

"It doesn't ... you don't think it's too _slutty_, do you?" Sophie's asking, and Vicky-T imagines she's twirling her hair or licking a popsicle as she says it.

"No, no," Mike says, and she can practically hear his boner. "Victoria, _you'd_ know, come take a look at this eyeshadow?"

Time drags for a moment when she feels her face flush red and takes a long, slow breath before she gets up, before she turns around.

Hilariously (the kind of hilarious where it's totally _not_) the longer she goes without fucking him (or anyone else at all) the more often he implies she's a _whore_.

She's thinking about drugs, right now. She's thinking about them singing in her veins and what she'd do right now if she felt free, free, free. Oh, she'd take both their heads off and swap them around.

She thinks of Gabe again, too. Of course, though, she has no way of finding him. NA's not until next Thursday, if he'd even be there.

She needs. To be. High.

—-

"Steve's phone!" A cheerful, polite, insanely English accent. She frowns. Weird. So long as Steve is there and she can still score, though, she doesn't care if his cat answers the phone.

"Hello-" There's a scuffling noise, and she waits until the phone's picked back up again. "Steve, you stupid fuck," she says into the silence. Whoever picked up has dropped the phone—it's not unusual for someone else to answer Steve's phone, fucked up out of their minds, mostly. But usually it's a girl, though Steve isn't _that_ particular in who he fucks in exchange for chemical payment.

"Hello?" she says.

Silence.

"Hang on one moment!" Distant and a little muffled. There's a bang and a scream and a laugh, like a slapstick western. "TV was up waaaay high." The very English man laughs.

"I," and she won't say need, she won't say need, she's not there yet, she's not there anymore, "wanted to talk to Steve."

"Steve is presently indisposed, may I take a message?"

"Victoria—just. Tell Steve I'll be there in ten."

"Make it twenty. We're kind of busy. Steve and I."

She rolls her eyes. Steve loves the freaks. She drops her phone on the couch and picks up her red hoodie, her favourite, slips it on over her dress.

She stands up and looks in the mirror. Flips her hood up. She feels a bit Little Red Riding Hood.

Steve likes her. She makes a face at herself in the mirror. Unplaits her hair, its wavy-curls are wispy-unkempt. Her mascara's run a little, she doesn't remember crying—maybe. She rubs at her lashes, leaves herself panda-eyed and dirty-knuckled. She paints her lips matte-red from the lipstick that's half rolled under her couch, smudges the colour a little around the edges. She looks how she feels, tired and a little _wrong_, a little off. Maybe she'll save a little money, batting her matted, mad eyelashes at Steve. Pretty for the boatman to save on her coins on the fare to hell.

She presses her lips to the mirror.

Kisses herself goodbye.

—-

A very tall man answers Steve's door while she's still flicking mud from her heels, stilettos dirty from sinking into the unkempt lawn. He's scruffy haired, stubbly chinned and the kind of tall that looks like he's been on a medieval torture rack, stretched and long.

"Where's Steve?" she asks, curling her hand up in her dress, wiping her fingers. She feels thin and frazzled, almost like going through the motions is bringing back the sense-memory of what it's like to be really strung out, really hurting and needing. She forces her hand open, clenches it again in the sleeve of her hoodie. Looks at the guy. He's looking back at her, really staring. She knows she looks as fucked up as she feels, half-deliberate.

"Wore him out, I guess." He lisps, camp as tents. "Poor baby."

"You've got-" because as a hangover from work, she can't help but point out when people have fucked-up makeup or parsley in their teeth. She swipes at her cheek.

He wipes across his cheek with the back of his index finger. Holds his hand out, long, long fingered and looks not at it, but into her eyes for a moment, before dropping his hand. She doesn't look at it. Doesn't want to know. Doesn't see the red. Her teeth chatter a little.

"I need—I want." She can't say it, she doesn't care, she just needs.

"I know, he told me you would," he says, and she thinks maybe, for a second, his accent drops. It's surreal. She doesn't care. "He left this for you." He pitches a baggie of pills over at her, little tiny blue things, like robins eggs.

She sticks her hand in her pocket before it occurs to her to ask. "What are these?"

"I can't tell you," he shrugs, smiles. "Just passing the parcel."

She finds she really doesn't care.

"How much?" She's got a week's pay in her bra, a flat wad of bills getting damp with her sweat.

"Nothing, darling, the music stopped on you. You get the prize."

—-

She's swallowed all six little blue pills, dry and practiced. It's just exactly too much. She feels it coming on in leaps. She's fine in the sunshine on the roadside, brick houses and grey pavement under her feet. She's okay and the shadows are longer, the bricks more red, the grass more alive than it should be. She's walking on multicoloured cobblestones and the path has more bends and less corners, she's walking through a forest, trees cracking through the pavement, vines devouring houses. Her doorstep, when she gets there, is mossy and damp, the mould on the walls has fucked however fungus does and spawned and spread and turned her little house green.

A tall figure sits on her doorstep, long, long legs bent at the knees like a grasshopper. When he stands up his legs are like skyscrapers and she hadn't realised she'd wanted to see his face again this badly until she was looking up at it, a long way away in the treetops.

"Hey, Gabe, how'd you know where I live?"

"I have a good sense of direction," he says, which she knows isn't an answer, but she doesn't care when he holds out his hand. "Want me to show the way?"

She looks behind her at the pathway through the woods. She puts her hand in his, looks up at his pretty face. His eyes are full of things she needs to know.

She wouldn't want to get lost.

"Why did you come find me after the meeting? I'm not going to fuck you," she says. She's lying, but she wants him to want her for more. She wants him to keep wanting her.

"I'm not here because I want to fuck you," he says.

"Prove it," she says.

"Vicky-T, just say the word and I'll do anything for you."

"Are you quoting Labyrinth at me, Gabriel?" Because that sounds so Jareth. She would make an awful Sarah, though. She would have given up her little brother for the power and the pretty dress.

"I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave."

She laughs and laughs, for a while, for enough time that when she stops, the sun has moved, the light shines differently through the trees. Redly. He smiles.

"You think I'm joking?" he asks, his fingers tight around hers.

"No," she decides. But it's still funny. He takes a step forward and she stays still, so he stops with a jolt, their arms stretched out between them. "Do we have to go in? What if we get lost?"

"I know the way," he says.

"Woodsman," she says.

He just smiles at her. Of course, she's stating the obvious. She feels stupid, dizzy. Streetlamps hang from treebranches, cars are eaten by creeping green fingers, lichen hangs like old man's beards over letterboxes, baby's breath sprouts through cracked asphalt. The road is the path, cobblestones wobble her ankles.

She flips up her hood and arranges her hair so it's not all caught up underneath, spilling out over her chest.

To grandma's house.

—-

The door is opened by the stretched tall man.

"You're Steve's friend, what-"

"I assure you I'm not," he says, and smiles at her. He has no accent now. But she's sure she's right, she's _sure_ it's him.

"But you gave me the pills," she says. She doesn't mean for it to come out as a question. Gabe's hands are on her arms and they're moving again.

"That's right," he calls after them, accent back on. Englishmen and mad dogs hiding in the trees.

They stop, inside a room, in a clearing, chirping, living silence all around them.

"I got you a present," Gabe says to her. Tall and solid against the green darkness, he's carrying his axe—the woodsman's axe.

"A present?" she says, and it comes out small. Ridiculous. She has nothing to fear. He's here for her. But he's holding it out, it's shining at her, blinking hello, I am dangerous.

"It's a baseball bat, Vicky-T. It's a baseball bat," he repeats it until she _sees_, then repeats her name again, "Vicky-T." In case she's forgotten. Maybe she had.

It's a baseball bat, Vicky-T. She mouths the words as she takes it and it doesn't cut her. It's heavy and warm in her hands, smooth splinterless wood. She remembers this feeling, this dead-living thing in her hands, ready for her to use. All she needed to get by—remembers it pulled from her grip. She was out of her mind, wild-haired and wide eyed, she broke her blood-red dirty nails on it, scrabbling to keep hold. It was the only thing she could rely on in the world, except the drugs in her veins and the inevitability of having to get more, no matter what, no matter what. She doesn't remember how long she slept, ate, lived with the solid wood by her side, head in the clouds and body cold, feet on necks, yelling and screaming and getting her way. Weeks? Months? A perfect blink, a perfect high, she remembers blood and mud and happiness, but not as well as she remembers afterwards—psych wards and forced detox, strapped down with pain that lasted for years.

"I used to have one like-"

"I know," he says.

Of course he does.

"I had a—they took it." They already had their own batons, but they took hers and they never ever gave it back, except across the backs of her knees so she fell in the dirt, spitting and screaming until the needles came, scratching and screaming until they held her down, ten men and a stretcher and a room they locked from the outside. Her parents' faces peering in, merciless through the glass, as close as they'd ever come to her. There'd always been glass between them.

"I know."

Of course he does.

"Thank you," she says, and grips it to her chest, hard line between her breasts and solid, comforting, one hand on it, one in Gabe's. Everything is still in the forest. Everything is quiet and watchful. Wary of _them._

"Can we talk, now?"

"They're all listening."

"Does it matter?" He asks, he knows what she means, of course he does.

"No. No, they're scared." She laughs.

"They," Gabe says, "they say you can't. Rules, laws, what exists but what you make it? Invisible walls made by invisible people. They do not exist. You exist. The _truth_, Vicky-T, is that you have so, so much _power_. They tell you you don't because they're scared of you. They're fucking terrified."

"I don't—I _want_—" he lets go of her hand and puts his hand gentle-firm over her lips.

"You're acting like a _mouse_, Vicky-T, you're not a mouse. You're a snake. You're not the prey. You're the predator. The world's scared of predators. People like us."

—-

She listens for a long time. A lot of things she doesn't remember, later. Not exactly. Things that were so obvious, so profound, so _true_, she finds herself breathless in agreement. "Yes," it comes out more earnest and awed, with more innocence than she thought she contained. "Yes, yes." She's harmonizing with him, rhapsodising gospel singer to his preacher, bursting with surety and faith in his word.

Her eyes are closed and red flashes over her lids when light splits the trees, but it's not comforting, it shatters the air and their perfect, fragile moment in the woods.

She stands, springs to her feet and holds her present with two firm hands. Gabe stands in front of her, though, and she doesn't see who it is breaking in here.

"This had better be important," Gabe says, and he sounds different, his voice is _harsh_ now. Vicky-T is ready to kill whoever is traipsing through the woods, ruining this. Gabe turns and faces her, puts both his hands on her shoulders. Gabe is solid, grounding. Out of her chaos. It makes sense when he's looking at her.

There's more noise behind him, though. Urgent.

"I'll come back. I will be back, Vicky-T, stay right here," he looks into her eyes and then he leaves.

And he. And he.

Leaves.

Her.

All.

Alone.

(In the woods.)

Her hands tighten, crackle and take root in the wood of the bat.

—-

She is Little Red Riding Hood in her pretty pretty dress, all kneesocks and red, red cape, all garters and lace. Vicky-T is the girl's name, here in the woods, the wolf, the woodsman, she will devour herself and cut herself open and devour herself again. She's all alone and it's dark here and the watchful eyes aren't so funny when Gabe isn't here with her, woodsman with his axe. Without him to guide her. She is confused and she is sure that she is confused.

On the path, she meets a wolf. He pokes his furry head around the doorway, bearded and fluffy haired. He's got predator's eyes badly disguised behind glasses. She sees them. There is blood under his short sharp wolf claws.

She stops still, because this is how the story goes.

"You are the wolf," she says, when the wolf comes fully into the clearing.

He pushes his glasses up his nose, tucks his long, light hair behind his ear. He's not as big as she expected. He waves with his fingers.

"But you'll howl," he replies, and my, what big teeth he has.

She laughs.

"Sit down."

She does, plunks herself down cross-legged, like she's back in kindergarten and learning a lesson, listening to this old story told to her, waiting for the moral.

"So. I know you're probably, um, confused right now, but I can _help_ you. Gabe isn't exactly what he seems. You don't need him, you don't need this poison."

"Poison?" she asks, and her heart beats a little faster.

"Gabe is. He gets his teeth into you and you're his, his _forever_. He won't tell you that, at first. He'll tell you you're _yours_. He lies, because he is a _snake_," he takes a breath in and smooths his fur—his hair—down with one hand. Pushes it behind his ear ineffectually. She's not watching, then, when he pulls the knife.

He's single fanged and more solid now, far, far more real.

"And how do we get rid of snake poison?" He flickers silver under her nose, and smiles, small and calm. "I like the old remedy. Bloodletting." Bloodletting. He holds his own wrist to his mouth, and looks at her from under his fur. His eyes are bright like a predator in the darkness, he can see better than she can here.

He flicks his knife in-out with the soft surety of a lifelong lover, no hesitation, no question of that they want or need. When he asks for her hand, she gives it willingly.

The woodsman will be back when he comes, but first, first the wolf eats her all up.

The blade is blood warn against her skin, no cold startling hiss of steal. Warm like a tooth.

Her fingers are long and thin in his, he flips her arm and draws and ugly line through her veins, cuts over her pulse, crosses it out.

She doesn't panic until he takes her second hand, then she realises this isn't. This isn't quite right.

No, no.

"No, no, no," she's wide eyed and he's still _smiling_. She scrabbles to shove him away, but she's slow and her legs aren't working. When she gropes the floor frantically for her bat, her nails bite into the wood of the handle hard enough that two of them snap, rip jagged, as he stamps his foot on it hard, tearing it out of her grip. He kicks it away under the mossy darkness of the bed.

"No, no, no," he says back to her, but he can breathe clearly and she realises then that she's not breathing well. He sets a finger against her breathless lips: shh. His hand is still around her wrist, tight and stronger than he should be. "This is what happens when you let him in, he poisons you. You can make this stop, Vicky-T. Stop taking the apples he offers you."

"You don't, he's not. You don't understand." The trees are bending in on them, a circle of looming villains, laughing and dark, she's not safe here anymore. Everything is watching. She's going to. She thinks she's going to die.

"I don't understand? _I_ don't?" He jerks her wrist towards him, the perfect undamaged one, and pushes his sharp sharp tooth right across it. He drops her. She slumps to the floor and grabs at herself, scrambles to keep all her blood inside her, back pressed against the corner of the room, rough as treebark.

"He is," he says, not even looking at her, now. Suddenly he's feet away, defanged, harmless, staring at his feet. "The poison, though," he says. Quietly. "It's not all out of your system." She holds her wrists with either hand, shackled by her wounds. "It itches, doesn't it?" He scratches his scalp, long and satisfying, he tickles the skin of his wrists with his nails, glancing up at her awkward-fast. She flinches. "Can't you feel it? Under your skin, where the poison's running out, itchy and wet. Tainted and _burning_."

She can.

She can feel it.

"Don't you want to scratch it?," he asks. "It's okay to scratch it."

She gently sets her nails around it, itching like a mosquito bite, not wanting to make it worse, but god, it itches so _badly_. The gentle scratching is only making her itch more, it's burning now, weeping red and burning and oh God, she's never felt anything like it in her life and she has to, has to set her fingernails in the valley where her skin is open, set her nails in the lips of the cut and scratch and scratch and scratch and she screams, it feels so good.

"Good girl," the wolf smiles all white teeth in the dark, then disappears when her eyes scrunch closed against tears and tearing.

—-

The wolf is gone before Gabe comes back to cut him open and all that's left is Little Red Riding Hood, curled on the floor, bleeding from the wrists. Except. Except she's not, now. Gabe's right there, when she opens her eyes—she'd forgotten she'd closed them—and Gabe's hand are on her wrists, warm and dry and wrapped tight.

"What have you done to yourself, Vicky-T? I said I'd be back."

She tries to explain it was the wolf, but he looks at her and she's dizzy and she doubts herself. "The wolf," she says, doesn't want to be the girl who cried. When she sits up, she expects more blood. She's sitting in a watery pink pool of warmth—she's wet herself and bled all over. She keeps her pristine white bandages out of the mess, balancing awkwardly on her elbows.

Gabe's a snake, he said, but Gabe _isn't_, she knows, Gabe is the woodsman. Lurking in the shadows. The poison in her veins is all her, she is poison, she is bad.

And maybe he wasn't real. She's looking down at her wrists, bandaged invisible. She remembers scratching, that's real. Wolves don't walk and talk and smile so _cold_ like that. She's made herself bleed before, though. She remembers.

"It itched so bad," she says quietly. "I fucking. I fucking pissed myself," and she remembers this, too.

He's not there, though, when she looks up. He's not there, but the door is open, wide and shining, and she does what they always tell you to do. She goes towards the light.

—-

She grips the bat to her chest, between her breasts, both hands around it tight, the whole way home. She's smeared pink patches of blood and piss over it from her palms. Warpaint. She checks around walls and doors and peers around corners like a soldier.

She checks for the wolf behind trees, rocks, cars. She ducks behind a fence and peers out into the street. Everything seems hazy. There are too many places to hide.

She wonders if he sees her.

She gets home and she realises she doesn't have keys anymore. She smacks at the door, frustrated, the jolt rippling through her palm and throbbing painfully at her wrist. The door creaks open.

The phone rings. She picks it up.

"Victoria? I know it's Saturday morning and _you're_ probably not feeling so great." He laughs, and she laughs too, but not because he's said anything funny.

"Hello, Mike." She wonders if she sounds strange, for long enough she misses half of what he says next.

"-if you could come in? There's more here to do then I realised-" and he keeps talking, but she's not listening.

Can she? She holds her bat out, still gripped in her other hand. It sways like a living thing, a snake deciding if it should strike. She knows now that she's been seriously tripping, and by the way it sways, she's still not all the way out of the woods (she wants to laugh, but it's not all that funny). There are still things in the corners of her eyes, alive and secretive. She pulls at the bandaged edges of her wrists with her teeth and thinks.

"You really want me to?" She asks.

"What? Yeah, come on in—only if you're _sure_ you're _feeling okay_-"

She hangs up on him.

\---

The door tinkles prettily when she walks in. She rips the bells down off the back of the door and smashes them with her new favourite toy like herbs in a mortar and pestle. Tinkle tinkle fuck you. She grinds the bells into a bent jumble of ruined metal.

She stands up straight, takes a breath.

Tucks her hair behind her ear.

Steady as she goes.

"Victoria?"

Aye-aye, captain fuckface.

"The bells fell down again!"

"Barely room to swing a _bat_ in here!" she calls. She can't tell how loud she's speaking, does she care? She doesn't think it matters. Mike's in the storeroom, door half open.

"I think you'll find that's _cat_, Victoria."

"No," she says, yells, loud and final. She feels like she's filling up the doorway, a tower set on their thin tapered legs, her shoulders spread like wings, the bat in her hands huge like a vaulting pole. She's tall, but she's barely steady, years of heels notwithstanding. She will be steady, though. Freedom makes her knees shake with joy, shake harder than whatever's pulsing away through her veins, beating through her heart.

"No?" Mike questions, still in the storeroom, not really acknowledging her. Hiding like a mouse.

So she decides to test her theory. A cat with a bat in the store like a bull in a china shop, she's mixing metaphors but that's okay because her head is more mixed than a shaken martini—no room to swing a bat.

She puts her fingertips against one of the jars on the far wall, her bat against the first shelf on the other side, and she walks.

Jars topple off the shelves on both sides, like there's a flood crashing through a dam that's been long held secure and _dead_. Liquid soap and glass and bath crystals explode, foundation and gloss and shampoos, sweet chemical smells almost make her dizzy with glee, the glass bursting is beautiful. She knows the shards are nicking her stocking-clad legs, knows it like that moment before you realise you've cut yourself shaving, a sharp adrenaline hit and no pain, no pain at all.

She's having too much fun.

She's sad sad sad when she gets to the bathbombs and bar soaps, they plunk heavy and fragile to the ground, cracking around her feet like a nest of half-hatched eggs, the life dying inside before it's born.

She stops are looks at the mess around her feet for a minute.

The storeroom door squeals in the sudden silence.

She smiles. That perfect pyramid of bath bombs, chalky baseballs in rainbow colours, oh oh oh. She takes a step back and lines up the topmost. Her backswing shatters a mirror, and forward the bathbomb explodes, a hazy rain of dust comes down over everything, like confetti, like it's her birthday. She laughs and twirls so her dirty dress umbrellas out oh and then she remembers.

Mike.

"Hi," she rocks on her heels, crunch crunch.

"You can't fucking! What the fuck are you doing!"

Vicky-T turns around and nudges the half-toppled mountain of bathbombs with her bat's end. Just a gentle shove in the right place sends everything toppling down, ball over ball thud thud thud.

She can do that. She can do whatever the fuck she wants.

She's talking, she realises.

"Are you _high_, Victoria? I knew—I knew it. I'm calling the police."

"Are you hiiiiiiiiiiigh, Victoooooria?" She parrots back at his face— he looks disgusted, disappointed (as if he has any fucking right), but mostly, mostly he looks scared. "I don't know," she says, but more quietly. Is she sober yet? Her legs aren't shaking now, her hands are steady, she's happy, she's happy. She's good. She's going to break some shit. She's going to be happy.

He moves for the phone and adrenaline explodes through her, joy soars on the updraft, bang boom through her heart like a shot of Epinephrine straight through her sternum to her heart. She'd been dying, dead for months and now she's so so alive. Fight or _fight_.

A consequence of removing the phone from his hand is, well, his _hand_. The phone flies backwards and smacks the wall with a crack and a rattle of brittle plastic breaking, or maybe the noise was his bones, his knuckles, she's cracked the skin fair across them and it's strange and thrilling to see the blood flow out in rivulets through the valleys of his clenched fist, drawn up tight and protective and horrified to his chest. No smart remarks now, nothing to say to her, no cracks about the length of her dress or the bags under her eyes. Nothing but fear in his face, a kind of awe and she thinks, yeah. He should get down on his knees and recognize that she is _powerful_.

"Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, you drug-fucked fucking bitch! Get out! Get the fuck out of here before-" His mouth flaps fear and spit towards her and he points wildly with his injured hand, fingertips bloody and writhing and she swears for a seconds she can hear the sibilant hissing and movement of snakes. It's not scary. It's not. He's not.

She's the predator here, she's always been the predator, it was just that he didn't know, and she'd forgotten. She's been reminded. Eyes and hands and easy words that made her remember herself.

She swings the bat again, he's moving in slow motion and she's thinking in fast forward, he hesitates and his hand comes up way too late—the bat smacks solidly across his cheek and it makes a noise like a party-cracker, bangsnap, his head snaps to the right and his face hits the wall with a dull damp thud. There's a fine confetti of blood.

She crouches down beside him. He's stunned, undamaged cheek to the floor, awake with wide eyes and gaping mouth fish breathing, open closed open. His eye is slowly turning blood red and his nose is trickling a thin line of blood over his lips. He rolls over on his back and coughs and coughs like he can't stop, like he can't breathe and blood bubbles out of his mouth, out of his nose.

"F-" she leans in close, listening for his _sorry,_ for his pleading, ear practically to his lips. "Fuck you, fuck fuck."

"You're never going to learn, are you?" she asks. He's a bug under her heel and he's lucky she hasn't stomped on him before now. Maybe, maybe she should have asked for his sorry, but she had almost hoped he'd take the hint and realise he'd maybe, just maybe, done something wrong to deserve this kind of wrath. She stands and turns him over gingerly with her toe, wiping the little drip of blood on him, wiping him off like the piece of _shit_ he is. She's kind of glad he'd failed her little test. She flips her bat up to rest on her shoulder, between her head and her neck, a violin player cradling a precious instrument. Ready to play.

She looks down at him and she's hypnotized by his hand, his working fingers wriggling across the floor, like they're dragging the rest of his arm with them, possessed. She's _staring_ and she feels dizzy now she's stopped, the world around her catching up to her hurricane whirl of destruction. She's stares down at the ground she's not _watching_, and her feet go out from under her so unexpectedly she chokes out a noise, like she's the mouse, like she's the mouse the snake got. She stumbles backwards, shoulders slamming full-weight into the blank space where the mirror used to be.

Her head bumps off the wall and for a hazy second she can't see, tuneless humming in her ears. His hand is on her arm, her upper arm and he's pulling her up-

She shoves her head up and cracks his chin with her skull, scratches at his arms with her nails. For a dizzying second she sees nothing but stars and then, blinking, her vision seeps back in.

"_Gabe_?" she chokes out, then wonders why she sounds so shocked. Gabe is very good at turning up just when she needs him. She shoves him away, adrenaline still pumping, wondering if he was followed by any wolves this time. Her hands twitch on her bat and his eyes follow the tense line of her knuckles, the flex of her sore wrists, but his hand are around them before she can move. Fast and mean, he pushes down with his fingertips, into her bandages, making her toss her head, her eyes screw shut, the bat falls to the floor and clunk-rolls away. She doesn't see where it lands, eyes on Gabe's. She pulls and twists her arms, it hurts it hurts it hurts.

"Stop," he says.

She bares her teeth at him. He set her in motion and he wants her to stop? She will go through him or smack her brains out against the wall of his chest trying.

He spins her like a top, he's strong, stronger than her, physically, and it burns her to even think it. Her arms are crossed around her body and his hold on her wrists is looser now, but she can't move. He holds her like they're dancing, her back to his front, like they're in some nightclub somewhere. Like he should be grinding against her ass, half hard. She wonders if that thought would scare her, normally. She looks down at Mike, his eyes rolling in his bloodied head, he looks at her and she can't tell if he sees her anymore, if he sees them. If maybe he's still looking at them and seeing nothing, no one.

"Think," Gabe says, straight into her ear, raising goosebumps along her arms. "Don't just do, Vicky-T. Think. You can do whatever you want. Think what that means. You have a choice here. Choice, freedom, power."

"Let me go," she says.

"Ask me properly."

"Let me the fuck go. Please?" She forces the question into her voice.

"You only ever have to ask," he says and steps away, her back cold now, the hair on her neck standing up at the feeling of him against her, his phantom warmth. Her wrists throbbing harder and she thinks she's maybe bleeding through her bandages. Warm.

She looks over her shoulder at him. Gabe leans long and lean against the plinth where the bathbombs were, hips pushed out, a slice of skin on show between his shirt and jeans. His fingertips are stained red.

She feels his eyes as she bends down and wraps her hand around the bat. Her grip isn't a sure as she'd like, not as strong as she feels.

"You're not powerless, Vicky-T. You can do anything." Gabe's voice is steady. He's just watching. Her heart beats hard and she hopes, she's sure this is the right choice.

"Hey, Mike?" She glances back and Gabe once more, making sure he knows this is her making her choice. Mike looks up at her, mumbles something, maybe no. "I quit." She cracks the bat over his ribs. Again. Again. Again. Until her arms burn and her wrists ache and her hair curls around her hot, damp forehead. Until she's spattered with choked out blood and spit. He grunts almost like he did when he fucked her, deep, animal sounds, but then she hits him, not different, not harder, maybe it's just she's found a sweet spot and everything starts sounding wetter—until his breath comes in gurgling hitches and she's reminded of her grandmother, at home to die. She didn't like the sound of it then, and she doesn't like the sound of it now.

She stops, closes her eyes. She wants him to be quiet. Death rattles through his chest and it sets her teeth on edge.

Gabe puts his palm over the back of her neck, huge and steady. Brushes her hair away softly, petting her skin.

She plants a foot on Mike's neck and presses down until the hitching, weak attempts at filling his lungs stop, until his face is purple-red and one of his eyes bleeds, he cries and blood trickles out of his mouth, over his chin, onto the toe of her shoe. She presses down and down until the kitten-weak fingers he's wrapped around her ankle fall slowly away.

Gabe replaces his hand on the back of her neck with his lips, dry and soft.

She takes her foot of Mike's neck.

"Well done."

Gabe holds onto her, pulls her into his side and out of the shop. They walk away, fast but sure. "Crying?" He asks.

"No," Her shoulders hitch, "Laughing."

She is, like a boiling pot, the bubbles of mirth replacing each other never ending, until all the feeling in her whole body evaporates and she's empty, but she has Gabe's arm around her shoulder. She's empty, but he's there to fill her up.

"You ruined. You ruined my life," she hiccoughs, chokes. She is smiling harder than her face can bear. It hurts.

"Do you hate me for it?"

He did. This is. He did—her life is destroyed. She hated that life, her own little existence, two years of bullshit built up to make nothing, it's gone. She has no home, no job, her freedom is forfeit, her prints are on file.

She should hate him.

"I think I love you for it," she says. "Who the fuck are you, Gabe?"

She's full of joy and covered in blood and she hurts all over, all of it concentrated in the sharp throbbing of her wrists and he shoulders ache for swinging the bat so hard and she doesn't care. She's coming down. She never been so happy coming down. Gabe's holding her up.

She sees the house properly when she comes to it the second time. She's sober now, stone cold with questions and consequences seeping into her.

She's tired, though, she's tired, but she doesn't regret a thing.

—-

The house he takes her back to, she can't even tell if it's the same one as before. She thinks it's not, but the fact that her point of reference is that it's not overgrown with an enchanted fucking forest probably doesn't help. All things look different in the daylight, too. There are places she's sure she spent the equivalent of months in, strung out or partying in the middle of the night, and she probably wouldn't recognize any of them if someone dropped her in them in broad daylight. There's no fear about this place, no particular mystery. It's suburban and it looks exactly like the various empty-looking showhomes around it. It's boring. It's fucking huge, too. It's not sinister except in how perfectly normal it seems.

The hallway is bigger than her whole mouldy shoebox apartment. She's busy staring at the walls with fascination she hopes she's hiding better than she thinks she actually is. It reminds her of being a kid, everything pristine and perfectly boring. It's not the kind of place she's lived in since she was maybe thirteen years old. The hall opens up into a large living area, all painted in neutrals, inoffensive and modern like a showhome. Except there's zebra stripe boxer-briefs hanging on the boring white fan blades, random enough she thinks for a second she's seeing things again. Two men stand in the middle of the room, waiting for them.

"Vicky-T, meet Ryland," Gabe nods to the very very tall man on the right, pointy shoes on his feet and a vaguely unsettling, unsettled smile on his face, "and Nate." Nate is very short to Ryland's very tall and the smile on his face is not unsettling in the slightest. It makes her smile back at him.

She doesn't, however, smile at Ryland. She recognizes him from Steve's house, handing her pills, from her little trip into the woods, opening the door for them. Pass the fucking parcel indeed. She's turning over potential nicknames in her head, because Ryland? Fuck no. She knows she should play it safe, she has no one but Gabe and these are Gabe's people. But she is sick of playing it safe, and that's the point. That's why she's here at all. She settles on "Hey Lurch." Gabe's the same height as him, actually, but she's feeling mean. That was one fucked-up trip, and though she's fully aware he most likely only did what Gabe told him to by handing her that little plastic bag, she still doesn't harbour a whole lot of love for him right now. Her wrists hurt and she's pissy-tired, piss fucking blood and spit stained and overwhelmed.

Nate snickers, and Ryland's smile doesn't drop, it quirks to the side and he cocks his head at her.

"You wound me," Ryland says.

"He lies," the little guy says. "You don't want to encourage him."

Vicky-T isn't sure what he means, exactly, but she can appreciate the warning.

"You don't want to encourage either of them. Or shit, maybe you do," Gabe puts a hand on top of Nate's head, rubs his fingers down to the back of his neck, cupping his hand there like he'd had it on hers earlier. "Nasty Nate." He scratches his fingers back up ruffles his hair proprietarily. "Make sure you get him to tell you _why_."

She raises her eyebrows. She totally will. He looks mostly harmless.

"I put the stuff from your house in your room," Nate says. "Come on, I'll show you." He throws her keys at her and she grabs them out of the air. They're useless, now. She pockets them anyway. As a reminder, maybe. She doesn't know. "You probably want to put that down," Nate says.

It takes her a second to remember she's still got her bat over her shoulder.

"Go," Gabe says, when she glances at him. She doesn't mean to, but she doesn't know exactly what to do here. She's just moved into a sharehouse full of freaks and she's on the run from the law. She's about to go tour the house courtesy of the little dude who's apparently broken into her house and stolen her own things for her. She's charmed. She's worried that she's charmed. Gabe smiles like he knows what she's thinking, and that's charming too. He palms the back of her neck, a quick pet, and she feels her shoulders relax a little.

—-

She meets the other Cobras later (Cobras. She loves that. It's what they _are_, it makes sense). Alex Suarez and Andy Hurley complete the set. Suarez is quietly but caustically sarcastic, and she has no idea if he likes her. Or anyone besides Gabe and possibly Ryland (though she thinks maybe this is only because the worse Suarez treats him, the happier he seems; their relationship seems to be based on give-take, where Suarez gives, and Ryland takes it). She kind of wants to fuck him, wondering if he'd be as softly ruthless in bed. But not badly enough to actually make a move. He's her type. She has learned to stay away from her type. Mostly. Sometimes. The first time she talks to him, he gets a nosebleed. "_Oh putain._ Old habits," he says. It's the first time she wonders how these people came together, how exactly they're like her, why she feels so at home here. Later, she will realise that everyone here was an addict, _is_ an addict (forever and ever, if she cares to believe what NA has taught her), reformed. Refocussed. Plugged into a different drug now, spelled G A B E. Written in blood across their hands.

Andy Hurley she meets like this:

It's breakfast time. Suarez is making crêpes, cursing in French and Spanish alternately. She's just awake and in the clear light of morning she's scared. She will never admit this. There's a strange feeling that everyone here knows everything about her, everything she did, everything she is. She dismisses it as paranoia from the comedown. It doesn't take her long to realise it's not paranoia if it's true—they do all know.

Suarez sucks blood through his nose and hold it in his mouth, wiggles his fingers at Ryland until he produces a handkerchief—honestly, a cotton handkerchief—and spits into it. He hands it back to Ryland, who doesn't hesitate very long to take the bloody spitwad back, but apparently it's a little bit too long and Alex throws the handkerchief, smacking him in the cheek. They smile at each other. Vicky-T would like to say she doesn't want to know, but she really kind of does.

"I hear you lived out the American dream last night, Vicky-T." Alex says, raises his eyebrows knowingly. His tone is half-mocking, but she can't analyse it. She feels like she has a hangover—acid and murder, worse than mixing pot and beer.

"Is that what you hear?" is what she settles on, noncommittal. She can be cool.

"What, you don't think killing your boss is the American dream? Come on. I'm pretty sure The Simpsons made that gag, it's gotta be true," Nate says, cheerful and coffeed up and laying it out there like it's nothing, his cheeks full of crêpe.

Like obviously she killed her boss, obviously everyone knows, obviously they should eat crêpes and laugh about it.

She doesn't know what to say.

Nate stabs a rolled up crêpe with his fork but pauses with it wobbling halfway to his mouth. "I just stuck my foot in it, didn't I?" Nate asks. "Um, Vicky-T, when I was getting your stuff, I broke into the wrong house first? And this ring accidentally fell into my pocket." He smiles earnest and full of a-grade fertilizer. Horse shit, she thinks. For one thing, he had her fucking keys. She also thinks he's fucking adorable.

He pulls out a white-gold band with a red stone set in it, and his pocket jingles like maybe there's more loot in there.

It's her first hint of two things: the first is that Nate probably wants to fuck her. The second is that Nate lies and Nate steals. It's a long time before she realises how deeply ingrained these things are in him, how sometimes he doesn't even realise, just does it like breathing, how there'll be times when he's far less subtle about it than even this. It's far less time than that, though, before she ends up in bed with him, his head between her legs, nothing false on his tongue. Her hands curled in his hair, her eyes looking out, ignoring the places they're meeting, her eyes on Gabe, standing in her doorway, casually taking in the sight, so assured it's his to take in she will never, ever question it. Later.

Now, she slips the ring on her pinky finger. Smiles at Nate.

"Listen, you two kids can stage the wedding later," Suarez plunks a plate of crêpes down beside her own, a mean little grin on his face. "First, newbie gets to do the honours."

Everyone in this room knows exactly what she did. No one cares. All they're doing about it is offering her extra breakfast?

"He wants you to go give Gabe his breakfast," Nate explains.

"Oh," she says. "He always get breakfast in bed?"

They all laugh.

She has no idea if that's a yes or a no.

"Tell her-" Nate starts, as she turns the corner.

"You ever want to taste my cooking again?" Alex says.

"Oui chef!" Nate replies sarcastically.

"Admit it, Nasty, you heard them _again_ last night and you want to know if they've killed each other yet as bad as we do."

Vicky-T decides she wants to know what the hell they're talking about, bad enough to go upstairs and knock. She trusts Gabe enough, already, to believe he won't let her walk into anything that could hurt her too badly.

She takes the crêpes upstairs and knocks on the boring cream coloured door that Nate had shown her was Gabe's.

"Come in if you're good looking!" Gabe calls whisper-loud from inside.

—-

Inside, she almost drops the plate onto the dull cream carpet.

Gabe's mostly naked, sheets dangerously low on his hips, happy trail (fucking ecstatic trail, she thinks, on barely a glance) leading to white satin, but that's not what startles her—there's someone asleep next to him, on top of the covers, face down with one leg bent up slightly, one arm shoved under a pillow, but in between: utterly and completely naked, but covered, covered in tattoos. His back is entirely a colourful demon mask, teeth like a wolf's, two empty eyes staring. Her mouth snap shut and she takes a second to cover her embarrassment at the fact she's been startled by a cartoon demon. Like something out of a bad trip, she thinks, and sneaks a glance out of the corner of her eye just in case.

"Vicky-T, meet Andy Hurley. He worked late," Gabe trails his eyes over Andy's back, gently. His hand over his hair. It's a possessive gesture, and a familiar one. It's an invitation to look, Gabe is showing off something he's proud of.

She doesn't like it.

Apparently neither does Hurley, because he wakes up abruptly and bats at Gabe's hand and turns over grumpily. Sees her. He sits up and really looks at her, squint eyed, bleary, like he's hung over, a strange blankness over his eyes.

He stares at her for a moment.

He's quiet and doesn't swear or stomp or slam the door, but the look he gives Gabe speaks volumes, and the soft snick of the bathroom door closing is final and aggressive in the silence.

Gabe frowns. He looks, for the first time since she met him, tired. Though she thinks maybe she just hadn't _noticed_, before. She feels uncomfortable, in the face of the tension and her apparent failure to see what's right in front of her face.

"I'm out," she says. "Enjoy." She glances at the door, then pushes his plate towards him across the sheets.

—-

Later, she sees Hurley again as he makes his own vegan pancakes, ignoring the breakfast Suarez had made. He's wearing a faded shirt with a cartoon pig on it, a speech bubble above it's head telling her that pigs are friends, not food. He's got on dorky-chic glasses, and she realises now why he'd looked at her so intensely before—she'd probably been nothing but a blur he'd been trying to make out.

He flips a pancake, tossing it out of the pan and catching it easily. It should be a homey, comforting image. It's not. Vicky-T's stomach flips and her skin breaks out of goosebumps. He gives her the cuntchurning creeps.

She ignores it, but she gets out of the kitchen. She avoids being alone with him, after that.

—-

It turns out the Cobras deal a lot of drugs and own a lot of houses. Houses are Gabe's thing. Property. Gabe holds a lot of parties. The way they deal is more like bringing a congregation together to worship than dark alleyway deals and rundown houses and secretive cell phone calls. Properties become clubs, illegal, exclusive, here tonight, gone tomorrow. Gabe owns a lot of houses. A lot of basements. Some industrial properties, places where no one can hear the music. Churches where no one really questions an influx of people until it's too late. She finds this strange at first, thinks maybe it's just that Gabe gets off on the sacrilegious aspect of destroying something holy with the drug-fucked orgiastic bacchanalia of Cobra's parties. Eventually she realises it's partly that, and it's partly that Gabe is fascinated by religion. Gabe doesn't host parties, Gabe assembles a congregation to get fucked up and dance and worship at the alter of his ideas, his drugs, his way. They're shepherds to the sheep.

They're in a house, this time. It's not the first house she'd come to with them, it's more run down and way easier to sacrifice for a party.

She's supposed to be finding someone for Gabe. Terence. "I'd send someone else, but a little birdy tells me you're the most qualified for this," Gabe had said, smiling at her and making her feel like they're the only people in the room in on a joke.

She takes his point quickly. This is a job for tits. It's not as sharp or painful as she'd thought: like other things she knows she _shouldn't_ be good at, things that they tell her she shouldn't want, like other things she's done with a laugh on her lips, she finds she's good with this. If some fucker is stupid enough to stare at her tits while she knifes him in the neck, well. The thought sends a tiny little thrill through her, a thump-thud of anticipatory arousal through her cunt. For Gabe.

"Anything you say, G A B E," and it's stunning how flippant she can make herself sound when she means it so much.

She presses a kiss against his cheek and her tits against his chest and slips out into the dark, sternum-shaking vibration of the party.

She tugs her bra straps up, readjusts her tits, and tugs the hem of her dress until it sits right where her stockings hit her suspenders.

She pushes through the crush of bodies, until she finds the dark corner where the little roach she's catching is lurking. "Hey," Vicky-T says, and flops down onto the ancient, badly sprung couch, lifts her legs into his lap. "Terence, right?"

He stares at her legs, her tits.

She leans in close to his face.

"Wanna come with me?" She bats her mascara fat lashes. He doesn't see, because he's still looking at her tits. She laughs. At him. So very much at him, though he laughs along, stupid slack mouth like a prolapsed anus. She chokes on a giggle and tries very hard not to snort—though he'd likely not even register it. He clearly doesn't care what comes out of her mouth. Just what could come in it. "Come on," she says, and takes his sweaty hand.

They leave the heartbeat thud of the party for the deserted part of the house; he laughs like they're doing something naughty, crossing the velvet rope. Actually they're just walking past Nate, who throws her the fangs-up from where he's standing in the doorway, keeping the party from spilling away from where it should be.

She sends him through the bedroom door first and doesn't bother letting him turn around before turning on the light. Picks up her bat from where it's propped against the wall and swings for the vulnerable, oh so easy backs of his knees. He falls heavily with a terrified squawk, rolls so her next swing cracks heavily across his shoulder. There's an interesting crunching sound. She wonders if she's dislocated his arm. "Well if you'd stop FUCKING moving! God," exasperated, she kicks him in the thigh and he scrambles towards the corner of the room. Better.

It occurs to her _afterwards_ that she's got to get him to Gabe, somehow, and now the useless roach can't walk.

"Way to go, Vicky-T," she says to herself. She checks if the door locks. It doesn't.

Of course.

"Well, you're about as useless as a limp prick, aren't you?" She presses her bat against his temple like she's lining up a golf shot and he whimpers, wiggles away across the floor, slowly trying for the door. "Huh," she says. "Smart prick."

—-

"What took you so long, you fuck him first?" Suarez appears as they make their painstaking way through the corridor, and she is tickled to her pinkest bits when his eyes widen and his mouth opens and nothing at all comes out.

"What, you want me to be rude and leave the cripple behind? What kind of a cunt do you take me for?" She prods the sole of Terence's foot and he crawls, painstaking slow, into the room.

Suarez smiles and she thinks, yeah, I know exactly what kind of cunt you take me for. The kind I am. She smiles back. These are the kind of moments they bond over, all her very worst ones. He gets it. She almost wants to just take him down like a big cat on a zebra and fuck his brains out, but that would be _inappropriate_.

"Fucker," she says to him.

Terence crawls forward until he's nearly dripping his snotty tears on Suarez's shoes. Ryland plants a huge foot in the centre of his back and pushes down. "Stay."

Suarez and Ryland drag Terence out by the ankles, shoving the basement door open and pulling him thudthud down the stairs. Terrence whines and yells and screams. It would hurt, his knees are kind of FUBAR'd, she guesses. His shoulder, too.

"Stiff upper lip," she hears Ryland uber-English at him.

Vicky-T giggles and rolls sideways along the wall. Job done. Nate pokes his head around the corner and comes to lean beside her. They exchange a glance. She slumps down so her face is buried in Nate's shoulder. Bites. Bites.

Nate's kind of like the little brother she never had. Well, that's not true. She had a little brother, a single year her junior. Nate is more like the little brother she actually likes. Except they also fuck a lot. Semantics. If fucking her pseudo-brother is the worst thing she does this week (she listens for the distant begging coming from downstrairs. Okay, the worst thing she does this week starting from _now_), she'll almost be disappointed.

She closes her teeth on his shoulder and his neck until she gets a reaction, which is Nate using his always-surprising strength to shove her off him. His advantage mostly is in his speed though, he's quick. Quicker than her. It's a friendly shove, no bikechain wrapped around his fist, and he's still smiling at her, even though he's rubbing his shoulder delicately. She guesses she nipped a bit hard. Whoops. She throws fangs at him and he holds his hands up back at her, a little all's well, a little thrill she still gets like she's six years old and she's been allowed to play with the big boys with their stupid handshakes and bullshit nicknames.

She walks backwards a few steps and mock pouts at him hard enough she's finding it hard to restrain the laughter. He looks up from under his eyelashes. "Fine, be that way, little brother. I'll make my own fun." She shimmies out of her dress, lets it fall to the ground, cast-off snakeskin, and walks into the bedroom she'd broken Terence in.

"Aw, come on Vicky-T." He follows her and shuts the door softly.

"No, I'm sad now. Can't you see how saaaad I am?" She pushes her bottom lip out stupidly, plants her hands on her bare hips.

"You're a liar," he says, and laughing, he gets to his knees.

"Takes one to know one," she says. "Huh." There's a line of blood tracing between her breasts. She looks down almost crosseyed to see the dry trickle disappear into the valley of her cleavage. Bends forwards to give him a better view. "You want to clean that up for me?"

Nate's shirt hits her in the face.

She mock growls at him and takes him down while he's halfway up on one knee to run; she puts him on his back and sits on him, grinding down a little, pushing her clit against the solid ridge of his dick, her underwear and the harsh line of his fly under her. Her eyes flutter shut for a second. Her knee is in something sticky. Probably what's-his-face's bloody crawl trail.

"Guess what?" she asks, watching Nate's carefully, convincingly blank face. He's a good liar, but he can't control the flush in his cheeks. "You're gonna eat me out, now."

He kisses the inside of her thigh and grabs her ass, and she lets him pull her forward.

—-

She's happy enough to grope around the dark house slowly, kind of sticky sans underwear, looking for somewhere to pee. She finds the basement door first, still shaky kneed as she stumbles baby-deer unsteady down the steps, trying to remember the layout of things in this house (so fucking many houses, she finds it hard to keep up with corridor turns and shifting layouts, like they live in some huge acid trip, like the stair room at the end of Labyrinth). She must have been with Nate for longer than she'd thought, because instead of avoiding bodies, she's avoiding the dregs of the party, beer cans and miscellaneous debris everywhere. She hadn't even noticed the bassline of the music disappearing from her chest, only remembered Nate's head between her legs, her legs pressed against his ears, one hand in his hair, concentrating hard on grinding down against him just as hard as she could get away with and keep him there.

If she remembers right there's ... a weird concrete fallout-bunker type room Gabe and Andy work in, bathroom, then the door that goes through to the carport and outside. Well fuck it, if she gets the carport door she'll go outside and piss in the garden. Won't help with the fact her thighs are practically sticking together, but whatever. She'll make Nate lick it off later. She giggles and slaps her hand against the cold wall to steady herself.

She pushes the door open and—oh. This is _not_ the downstairs bathroom.

"Vicky-T." She glances up, wide eyed and staring, like she's been caught, like she's walked in on something far, far more intimate than the first morning she'd seen Andy and Gabe together. More intimate and more volatile. She can't believe she was ever shaky and shocked so easily by the sight of them in bed.

Hurley turns his head to her, his hand around a flashing silver fang. There's broke-kneed guy (she knows it's him, but not because she recognizes him. There's far too much blood for that, drip dripping from the end of his nose like sweat, thud-plunking hollowly onto the plastic drop-sheets).

"Shut the door," Gabe says gently, appearing in her line of sight and blocking everything else from view. She hadn't seen him move. He looks at her carefully, like he's checking for something, looking right into her. As if he thinks it's the blood or the pleading or the missing pieces of the man she can't handle.

She sucks in a breath and gropes back to the stairs.

It's not.

It's just that Hurley. Hurley is the wolf.

—-

She stumbles upstairs and she can't find her fucking fucking fucking room in this new house, this fucking ruinous mansion on a hill. She slams a cupboard door, stumbles into the next room and sits with a thump on the bed. Her fingers go to her wrists like shackles, feeling the uneven skin there. There's a forest—no, she's not in the woods.

She's on a bed.

"Hey."

She's on Nate's bed.

"He's a wolf. Hurley. He's a wolf."

"You could say that," Nate says, cocking his head in the darkness. Nate is the one who listens. He has a high capacity for bullshit, because he's usually so full of false words himself and she's frustrated that she hadn't taken a minute to calm down. To breathe. Nothing happened. She's here. It's okay.

"No, no. He's _the wolf._" She holds her wrists up. "He fucking did this to me."

She can't make out Nate's expression in the darkness, but he's still. Very still in the darkness. She doesn't want to—she doesn't want to leave. She almost doesn't want to know.

"Stay here," he says, and he leaves almost as quietly as he'd listened.

She doesn't know what's about to happen, she doesn't know why he was so still, she doesn't know why Hurley—did they all _know_ already?

She waits until Gabe comes and it's the first time she's ever been scared of him, but the look on his face is _murder_. Nate isn't with him.

"Tell me what he did."

She does. Gabe says nothing at all. Nothing at all except "_Elisa_."

"What?" she asks, She sounds like a weak pathetic _girl_ and it makes her heart beat harder.

He doesn't answer her.

"Did you know?" she asks, despite being completely unsure that she wants the answer.

"Come with me. Come downstairs."

She doesn't want to.

"Bring this," Gabe says, and tosses her the bat that's in his hands.

She grips it with sweating palms and feels a little safer. She follows him. Downstairs. Towards the room with the wolf.

It takes until they're at the bottom of the stairs until Gabe to turn around, frowning, now, apologetically, like in the rush he'd forgotten something. "We're going to deal with this. We'll fix this." It takes him a minute, he's not looking at her, and she feels abandoned, confused again, then: "It's okay. He won't do it again." He looks up at her. He's not smiling. Gabe is the kind of person you feel like you've known forever from the first instant he looks at you, and she feels like it's been _forever_. She doesn't have any doubt left in her. It scares her and it makes her want to make him smile so badly, even in the haze of her own confused shameful fucking fear, she's surprised. Her face flushes red. She'd do anything.

Nate, Alex and Ryland are inside the room.

No one looks happy to be there.

"Ryland," Gabe says, "lock the door." He does, and with the snick of the lock, Vicky-T watches Andy's hand curl and clench in his pocket. "Why'd you have to do it, Andy?"

"I was trying to make you _see_. You wouldn't listen, Gabe. You haven't been _paying attention_. You're not saving them anymore, you're poisoning them. I just ... wanted to show you."

"Elisa?" Gabe's face is stormy.

"She was an _example_."

"She was mine!" Gabe raises his voice and everyone in the room startles. Vicky-T's joints creak as she grips the handle of her bat, making sure.

Andy looks at her, suddenly. "She wasn't meant to _live_. You know I'm not stupid. You know. You wouldn't have tried the drugs again after Elisa and then her died."

"My very own Judas," Gabe says, and his anger is gone just like that, the smile back on his face.

Andy laughs and Vicky-T's hands tighten around her bat. That's not the right response.

"Of course I am, Gabe. That'd almost make you _God_." The way Andy says it drips with bitterness, the kind that takes a long, long time to distill, the kind that has to start life as something good to end up the kind of thing that burns so pure all the way down.

"Your words. What happens when you fuck with God, Andy-pandy?" Gabe's smile is warm like shell casings.

Andy's smile slips away.

"Fuck you," he says.

Gabe says nothing, and they just look at each other. Something quiet passes between them. No one says anything.

"FUCK YOU," Andy yells.

Gabe laughs at him. "I'm going to miss you, _bebé._" There's audible regret in his tone that Vicky-T is _sure_, absolutely sure, is real. It makes her want to hurt Andy, overrides any desire for revenge on her part—the fact that he'd hurt Gabe makes something inside her catch fire and she wants him to burn. She gets her chance.

"Don't kill him," Gabe says.

That's his only instruction.

Andy looks small, smaller than normal, encircled and trapped by them. His knife is in his hand, but she's not afraid of him now. Nate's bikechain is at her side, Ryland's long knife, whatever vicious weapon Alex has laid hands on last in his.

Gabe turns his back. _He's choosing me,_ Vicky-T thinks, _he's had Andy forever, he loves Andy, but he's. Choosing. Me._ She smiles through the backswing.

—-

Curled on the ground in a tight, bruised ball, protective of his softest parts, there is still something about Andy Hurley's bleeding face that infuriates her. She focuses on the fear that's all over him. He sweats and he shakes; he still says, "fuck you," to them all, but it shakes high and thin from his throat and that makes her feel a little better. His wrists are shackled together with Nate's chain.

Gabe pushes off the wall and crouches in front of Andy. He puts a hand over his mouth and waits until Andy is silent and still.

He holds a pill out in his hand, in front of Andy's eyes.

"No," Andy says. "Gabe, don't. Don't fucking do that to me, Gabe. Cut me, fuck me, but don't do that."

Gabe is silent. He waits.

Andy's face contorts and cracks and it's actually one of the more disturbing things Vicky-T's seen recently. He looks broken.

"Please," he says, quietly.

"Leave us alone," Gabe says.

Suarez turns away first, an unquestioning about-face. She follows his sure footsteps out and upwards.

—-

"I can't fucking believe it," Suarez says, hushed.

It's never been this quiet in the Cobra kitchen.

"Tell me what just happened," she says.

"Not everything revolves around you," Suarez snaps and clangs a pan down on the stove. He can't be in the kitchen without making something. "You're such a fucking _girl_."

Vicky-T is fairly fucking sure that this, at least, was _something_ to do with her, thank him very fucking much, the misogynist prick. She can't be bothered, though, to argue. Everyone is keyed up or coming down and Suarez, at least, hadn't hated Andy. He'd been with them—she doesn't know how long, but longer than her. She isn't in the mood to eat. She shoves her chair out from the table and nudges his pan off the stove on her way past. The clatter of metal on tiles and his bitch-cunt flavoured cursing, his incomprehensible but angry rapid fire French and Spanish fade out after her.

Nate follows her and of course it's him that talks. He explains Elisa, Gabe's enforcer before her. Explains her cut wrists, her life sprayed all over the walls. Gabe had been devastated. Months of work. He'd thought it was his chemicals, his method, how deep he'd been in her head, he'd been devastated—but Andy had been talking, quietly, in that innocuous way of his, harmless uming and ahing over how Gabe did things—about how much _poison_ Gabe used, about how they made their money, about how maybe that was why Elisa had gone and painted her bedroom red.

Vicky-T realises this was inevitable. She was just the baseball bat that broke the camel's legs.

—-

It's not until the next morning that Gabe comes upstairs, bloodstained and black-eye tired. Alex hands him breakfast without a word and Gabe eats like he's starving, or just desperate to get back.

Ryland lays his head on Gabe's shoulder and whispers in his ear.

"Soon," Gabe says.

None of them, none of them expect Andy to be gone.

When Gabe calls, Vicky-T runs downstairs in her underwear and a shirt Nate had stolen from someone last night, bat in hand—but the carport door is open and there's no Andy, no van, nothing but a thin trail of blood that runs out far too soon.

—-

This week they're in a church in New Jersey. Gabe's setting up for a massive party. Vicky-T's been doodling snakes onto all the stained glass windows, little watchers in every biblical scene. Draws a Cobra's hood on the bottle-green glass snake offering Eve a pretty red apple, her chemical-smelling black marker squeaking across the glass.

Ryland's holding the ladder for her, soliloquising on her socks, her legs, the fact that he can see her underwear. He wrote an honest to shit sonnet about her stockings the other day.

She laughs, until, dubious but enthusiastic English accent intact, he says: "Oh, Victoria."

She slides down the ladder and walks him two steps down the centre aisle before she swipes his legs out from under him, his head narrowly missing the pew to his right. She plants her heeled foot in the middle of his chest.

"My _name_ is VICKY-T. Say it."

"Vicky-T!"

"You're only encouraging him," Alex says, picking at his nails with a kitchen knife.

Vicky-T doesn't particularly care for Ryland's feelings, here. His dick isn't her concern, whether it's hard right now or pissing his pants. Of course the fact that she's got a foot on his chest and she'd practically _yelled_ at him, oh my, means she can make an educated guess Ryland is totally enjoying himself. It makes her curl her lips a little, which makes him curl his right back. Not quite smiles.

"You'd know," Nate shoots back, not even looking at them from where his face is buried in Gabe's neck.

She vows to fuck Nate's brains out later. He is her favourite little dude.

"Get off Gabe's dick and come say that," Alex points the knife at him, but smiles as sharp as its edge, as happy shiny.

"Say it again, Ry." Gabe advises from where he's leaning against the pulpit, on the red-carpeted dais at the front of the church. He watches them over Nate's shoulder, one palm flat across Nate's back.

"Vicky-T," Ryland says from the floor, looking up at her with the kind of awe he usually saves for when Suarez is in a particularly bad mood.

"That's my name," she confirms.

She is powerful.


End file.
